Optimizing a telecommunications network may require balancing equipment and trunking against service and cost. Network design may involve predicting future demand based on past results, evaluating the capacity of equipment and facilities, and providing the correct amount of capacity in the proper configuration, in time to meet service objectives. Since virtually every element of a telecommunications system is subject to failure or overload effective testing, monitoring, control, and maintenance is essential to obtain an acceptable level of performance.
Monitoring and analyzing types of traffic going through the telephone network may help identifying jurisdiction and ownership associated with the traffic (also known as jurisdictionalizing the traffic). The term jurisdiction may refer to a billing rate that is applied to a call based on state and federal tariffs. This process may consist of identifying if traffic originated or terminated to a Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) subscriber (e.g., Verizon™). Jurisdiction may then be applied based on the relationship between the rate centers of the Calling Party Number (CPN) and Called Number (CLD). In determining jurisdiction ported numbers may be considered. A ported number is a number that is no longer associated with the service provider that originally assigned the number to the customer. A customer of a telephone number assigned by the service provider has the ability to change service provider while keeping the same number. For example, a user of a telephone number assigned by AT&T™ has the ability to change carrier to Verizon™ while keeping the number originally assigned to the user by AT&T™.
However, using the ported numbers to identify the jurisdiction may not lead to an optimal result for jurisdictionalizing the call. This is because some switches serve more than one service provider or serve more than one rate center (e.g., providing different rates for calls) but use only one Location Routing Number (LRN). An LRN may be a unique number that uses the format of a telephone number, but actually represents an entire telephone switch through which multiple telephone numbers are routed. As such, the use of the ported numbers may introduce error into the jurisdiction process as some ported numbers will be mapped to the LRN's rate center and not their own rate center.
If originating or terminating to a Verizon subscriber, the call was labeled non-transit and the owner of the traffic was the owner of the switch being studied. Such determination of call ownership does not take into account call forwarding and ported numbers, for example and as such may introduce error in assigning ownership to the call. Hence, a need exists for a more accurate determination of the ownership and jurisdiction associated with the traffic going through the telephone network.